Ex-Googlers Relaunch Their Startup Stamped And Get Ryan Seacrest, Justin Bieber And Ellen DeGeneres To Invest

Alyson Shontell, provided by

Published
9:04 pm PDT, Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Last Spring, Robby Stein and Bart Stein (not related) left their jobs at Google to start a company, Stamped.

Stamped received funding from Google Ventures and others to become a mobile app that would make restaurant and small business reviews more social.

It was well received and named one of the best new apps in the App Store. But a few months in, Stein and his two cofounders realized they had a bigger, better idea.

They wanted Stamped to be a place where users could keep track of all of their favorite things, from restaurants to books, movies and music. It should be more like Pinterest and less like Yelp, they determined.

"Ellen talks about her favorite things on her show all the time; now she has a place to put them," says CEO Robby Stein.

Stamped 2.0 now app operates like Twitter; you can follow others and see their activity in your feed. Each user only gets 100 stamps to use on their favorite things and they're given more if users interact with their recommendations. The stamp limit, Stein believes, will make every recommendation more authentic.

In addition, Stamped creates personalized guides for users based on their interests and their friends' recommendations. It pulls together lists of books, restaurants, movies and songs for users to try based on suggestions from trusted people and publishers. The New York Times, for example, will be putting all of its Best Sellers on Stamped as book recommendations.

Stamped has relationships with over a dozen third-party sources, from Spotify to Amazon. When you find a song on Stamped, for example, you can listen to it in the app through Spotify. Books can be previewed and purchased via Amazon. But all of the information you need about a product or service you discover on Stamped is available within the app.

The three founders, Robby, Bart and Kevin Palms, are determined to build a long-term network where people help others discover amazing things.

"People ultimately discover things through other people in offline conversations," says Stein. "We built the new version of Stamped to capture a people-driven approach to discovery."